Imagine practicing yoga surrounded by the delicate beauty of spring—wildflowers nodding gently in the breeze, the scent of fresh herbs and tea leaves in the air. This is the magic of the Tea House, where nature and mindfulness intertwine to create a space for deep connection. We invite you to embrace the season’s rising energy in our April yoga series.
Meditation is not a linear journey. It’s not about achieving a specific state or reaching a final destination. Instead, it’s a variable practice that shifts and evolves. This fluidity makes meditation an opportunity for exploration rather than a pursuit of perfection. It invites us to let go of binary perspectives such as good or bad, right or wrong, failure or success.
Do you feel like meditation just isn’t for you? You’re not alone. Meditation is often seen as a gateway to calm, clarity, and balance. But the truth is, sitting in silence can feel anything but peaceful. It’s important to understand that meditation isn’t about achieving peacefulness. It’s about learning to focus on a single thought, noticing distractions, and gently guiding your attention back.
As the calendar turns and the new year approaches, it’s easy to get swept up in the tide of resolutions and the pressure to “start fresh.” We draft lists of goals and set rigid expectations, believing that January 1st marks the start of a perfect, linear path toward self-improvement. But what if we approached the new year differently? What if, instead of rigid resolutions, we embraced curiosity, intention, and a willingness to ease into this next chapter with grace?
The sacrum, often overlooked, plays a vital role in both spinal health and overall movement. It's not just a single bone but a fusion of five vertebrae that occurs as we age, usually completing the process in our 20s. Despite this fusion, the sacrum is part of a dynamic system that requires awareness and movement to stay healthy.
Dogwood studio wishes you and your family a happy holiday season and continued health in the new year.
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Holidays are usually a happy occasion, although they can also bring a lot of negative stress. Add the negative stress of the continued pandemic along with loneliness due to ongoing quarantines, and it is a mixture that can cause the soundest sleeper among us to have problems drifting off. Negative stress causes a release of stress hormones that increase the heart rate and change the blood flow. Over a long time, this can cause physical changes including sleep deprivation. Statistics show that Americans are sleep deprived, which is defined as having fewer than seven hours of sleep a night. Sleep deprived adults have increased risk for health conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, and depression.
What Can We Do to Sleep Better and Improve Health?
Dogwood Studio has been focusing classes on different yoga archetypes. If you are not familiar with what this means, an archetype is “the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies (Merriam-Webster). An archetypal approach to yoga is where yoga poses or movements are categorized based on their target during use. Poses and movements can fall under more than one archetype. An archetype has a primary target of certain myofascial groups and skeletal segments. Paul and Suzee Grilley (link HERE) pioneered this approach to yoga. Yoga poses and movements are meant to target certain areas, and archetype poses connect intention to the pose. This approach does not focus on the look of the pose but the function or target, and therefore accommodates many differences between each of us in our skeleton and in out fascia. At Dogwood Studio, we expand the archetypes to overlap with the major groups of fascial planes in the body.
Many of us still feel uncertain about how celebrating the holidays will be during a pandemic, when you will get a vaccine, when everything will be safe enough to fully reopen, and we can return to our previous routines. An article in The New York Times “Pandemic-Proof Your Habits” notes that routines help us to feel safe. When we follow a routine, however small, we are telling ourselves that there is no danger present and we can relax. Because we cannot know when or if things will return to the way they were pre-pandemic, we need to stop waiting for normal and our old routines. Instead, we need to take charge of ourselves and create new routines.